Apart from noting some ‘excessive’ detail and my using Italian plurals, John McBeath has praised the book heavenwards. He says it will appeal to music lovers, of course. But he also writes that it will interest a ‘wider audience because of its poignancy, and the detective-story aspect of this Australia-related tragedy’.

Authors wrestle with the idea of market. Who’s going to read my book? What is its natural market? Is it of wide enough interest for non-specialist readers? Is there enough excitement, drive, energy in the story itself to padlock readers to the question a good yarn always imposes: And then? And then?

Well, I’ve been confident ‘A Lasting Record’ will have huge general appeal. For a start, it’s about a famed concert pianist, William Kapell, who died young in an air crash. And it’s also about the eccentric cosmetics salesman, Roy Preston, who engraved onto acetate discs from radio broadcasts some of Kapell’s last performances. McBeath calls my telling of this aspect of the story an ‘amazing account’. It’s about how those recordings became commercially released, a detective yarn worthy of a Scando thriller writer.

But it’s also about Willy Kapell’s rocky courtship of the gorgeous Anna Lou and the anti-Semitism it almost foundered on. And it’s also about Qantas’s shameful, in my view, defence of Anna Lou’s actions in New York courts to be compensated for the death of her celebrity husband. She was the only relative of the 11 passengers in the plane not compensated.

Of many heartening aspects of McBeath’s opinion is his apparent enjoyment of my dramatic (fictional) reconstructions of certain scenes in the book. He finds the run-up to the DC-6′s crash ‘utterly believable’. And Downes ‘credibly reconstructs an imagined scene as Preston makes the only known recording of the last ABC broadcast … of Kapell playing …’

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About Stephen Downes

Stephen Downes is a Melbourne writer and freelance journalist. Over almost three decades he has contributed regular columns to many of Australia’s most prestigious newspapers and magazines, including The Age, The Sunday Age, The Sunday Herald, The Australian Financial Review, and Gourmet Traveller. Advanced Australian Fare, his history of Australian restaurants and the development of Australian cooking, was named Oustanding Food Book of the Year at the 2003 Australian Food Media Awards. It was one of two runners-up in the 2003 World Gourmand Cookbook Awards culinary-history category. Blackie, his book about the life, illness, treatment and ultimate demise of a family cat, has been translated into Italian, Dutch and Greek, and Adagio for a simple clarinet blends biography, autobiography, history, travel, musicology, Mozart and fiction into a story that writer and critic Michael McGirr described as being ‘as humanly rich, thought-provoking and deftly structured as anything I have read in a long time’. To Die For, 100 food experiences you should have before you die, won the Rest of the World in English 2005 World Gourmand Cookbook Awards food-literature category. Paris on a plate, recounts 12 days of eating and many fond memories of the French capital.
A memoir Gut Reaction was published in 2011, and in February 2013, A Lasting Record tells the story of America’s greatest pianist and the Melbourne lipstick salesman who immortalised his genius.
His views expressed on this website are his alone.